Monthly Archives: September 2011

Whose foreign policy objectives are we pursuing?

Posted by on 2011-09-19 No comments

Libyan rebels

Two months ago the United States recognized South Sudan. Last March the US started bombing Libya for regime change. Four months later it recognized that new rebel regime. For decades the United States recognized Taipei, not China, as the legitimate Chinese government. Only in 1972 did the US finally recognize a nation of nearly a billion people.

Hillary Clinton at AIPAC

Despite the ease with which nations can be recognized or ignored, the United States insists that a Palestinian state cannot exist without further negotiations with a Likud government whose party platform says: “Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan River. [..] The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state.”

For decades the United States has mouthed support for a Two State solution. But for 42 years US-mediated talks have produced nothing but delays during which Israel continued its military occupation and built more settlements. In 2009 President Obama went to Cairo and again made promises to resolve the issue. But once again the US has failed to deliver.

Abbas at UN

On Friday, frustrated by four decades of stonewalling and US bias, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas will go to the UN and, in more a poker play than anything, will ask the Security Council to grant Palestine the same type of statehood that it granted Israel 63 years ago. Though this will almost certainly be defeated, Abbas will finally force the US to show its hand. The US has promised Israel it will use its veto to kill a Palestinian state despite the fact that over three quarters of the General Assembly support it.

The reasons for a US veto run counter to its own interests in supporting democracy and peace in the Middle East. Instead, they are motivated by a powerful pro-Israel lobby and by growing “Old Testament” fundamentalism among a Congress which sees Israel as a divine nation.

Cantor v'Netanyahu

Last month a fifth of all American Congressmen and half of all Freshman Congressmen accepted free junkets to Israel funded by a wing of AIPAC instead of facing their own constituents on economic issues during the recess. At the same time, the Israel Project, a right-wing, Muslim-bashing group, brought 18 American ambassadors to Israel as well.

All this effort was to kill a Palestinian state. The pressures that both Democrats and Republicans feeding at the trough of the Israel Lobby or acting out of religious sentiment exert on foreign policy is intense. Intense and extremely dangerous.

Dangerous because the United States is ignoring the lessons of the Arab Spring – that its pliant regimes in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, and elsewhere are despised; and, by extension, the US is too for supporting them.

Dangerous because former allies like Egypt and Turkey have finally had it with biased US foreign policy and now see the United States as toxic and irrelevant. Even the Saudis have threatened to reevaluate their relationship with the United States. And Turkey is starting to challenge the US as a regional power broker.

Obama at AIPAC

Dangerous because the United States is becoming isolated internationally by confusing Israeli interests for our own. Two weeks ago, in a speech at the Jewish People Policy Institute, Ambassador Daniel Shapiro said it quite bluntly: “The test of every policy the Administration develops in the Middle East is whether it is consistent with the goal of ensuring Israel’s future as a secure, Jewish, democratic state. That is a commitment that runs as a common thread through our entire government.”

Dangerous because an isolated US and Israel make war more likely.

This subservience to a foreign nation’s interests troubles even strong Israel supporters.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman worried in a recent editorial that Israel’s policies have “left the U.S. government fed up with Israel’s leadership but a hostage to its ineptitude, because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.” Friedman thinks the US is painting itself into a corner with its veto: “the U.S. does not have to cast a U.N. veto on a Palestinian state, which could be disastrous in an Arab world increasingly moving toward more popular self-rule.”

War on Iran

Once the Israel Lobby digests its meal of the remains of the Palestinian state, what’s next on the menu? Already the pro-Israel hawks are calling for war on Iran. Most of the Republican hopefuls are nodding in agreement with Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon when he says: “All options are on the table.”

Whose table is that?

Todays Opinion Page

Posted by on 2011-09-13 No comments

Today’s opinion page was a smorgasbord of conservative thought on lessons to be drawn from 9/11. I don’t know whether it’s News Corp finally exerting its right-wing politics on the paper, a new editorial policy, or what, but we seem to be treated to an increasing dose of reprints of editorials from the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Washington Post and the Weekly Standard. None of the articles on 9/11 were particularly illuminating, but they sure did manage to defend the militaristic and Constitution-hostile world created by the former president and continued by the current one. Even Mr. Obama’s appeal to unity the previous day only papered over the reasons we now find ourselves in never-ending war.

Rather than cloaking ourselves in martyrdom, we should be asking ourselves, honestly, why so much of the world hates us. And, no, it’s not because they hate us for what we have. A lot of the world hates us for what we are doing.

The first essay by Omar Ashmawy, a military prosecutor who did not have enough misgivings about the dubious enterprise at Guantanamo to work there himself, regrets that the US military and law enforcement officers are so ignorant of Muslims and Arab culture. There is nothing wrong with this at all, but Ashmawy makes no mention of our distorted foreign policy in the Middle East as the obvious source of hatred of the United States. It serves little purpose for the FBI and Homeland Security to stop reading Islamophobes and start studying real Middle Eastern scholars when most of the Republican presidential candidates have signed on to Muslim-bashing legislation, Congressman Peter King is conducting antisemitic (in the broadest sense of the word) witch hunts, when we have covert drone wars going on in Arab countries in addition to our public ones, we support an indefensible occupation in Palestine, while half our freshmen congressmen spent their summer recess in Israel, and we honor the Arab Spring by defending despots in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. We’re either ignorant, stupid, arrogant, simply don’t care, or some mixture of all of the above. But it’s a recipe for people hating us.

Similarly, the Washington Post’s article is another salute to the conventional wisdom and learning nothing from the preceding decade. There is no mention of the shredding of civil liberties – except where the Patriot Act is defended as “modest” and prudent. No mention of the loss of habeus corpus, widespread wiretaps, email snooping, monitoring of social networking, and the loss of many of our core civil liberties. The article echoes the Heritage Foundation’s distortion that military expenditures over GDP are smaller today than during the Cold War – which is true, except that both military expenditures per capita and as a percentage of our national budget have risen sharply since the Cold War. And much of the divisor, the gross domestic product, is offshore nowadays, in contrast to the Cold War when we still had a domestic manufacturing base. Today more of our tax money goes to killing people in other countries than ever before. The Washington Post’s article warns of “prematurely” getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan – despite the fact that these are already the longest wars in American history. In short, the Washington Post advocates permanent war.

Finally we are treated to a defense of Dick Cheney by neoconservative Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes. Cheney is on a tour promoting his new book, “In My Time,” and apparently Hayes, who has another book of his own on the former vice president, is simultaneously trying to sell it and rehabilitate a man whose book, if I had my way, would be titled “Doing My Time.” Cheney most certainly is a neoconservative, helped kick off the neocon think tank Project for the New American Century, is married to a neocon, most certainly did attempt to expand the powers of the executive branch, and most assuredly does not lose one second of sleep over his involvement in the most disastrous American war since the Civil War. Why, on an anniversary of 9/11, is the Standard Times interested in repairing Cheney’s image with bald lies? A better editorial might have examined how a relatively small group of neoconservatives managed to steer the nation onto the rocks.

This was published in the Standard Times on September 14, 2011
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20110914/opinion/109140341